Re: Best OS for Postgres 8.2

Claus Guttesen <kometen@gmail.com>

From: "Claus Guttesen" <kometen@gmail.com>
To: "david@lang.hm" <david@lang.hm>
Cc: 李彦 Ian Li <liyan82@gmail.com>, "PostgreSQL Performance" <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Date: 2007-05-08T08:22:33Z
Lists: pgsql-performance
> > In #postgresql on freenode, somebody ever mentioned that ZFS from Solaris
> > helps a lot to the performance of pgsql, so dose anyone have information
> > about that?
>
> the filesystem you use will affect the performance of postgres
> significantly. I've heard a lot of claims for ZFS, unfortunantly many of
> them from people who have prooven that they didn't know what they were
> talking about by the end of their first or second e-mails.
>
> much of the hype for ZFS is it's volume management capabilities and admin
> tools. Linux has most (if not all) of the volume management capabilities,
> it just seperates them from the filesystems so that any filesystem can use
> them, and as a result you use one tool to setup your RAID, one to setup
> snapshots, and a third to format your filesystems where ZFS does this in
> one userspace tool.

Even though those posters may have proven them selves wrong, zfs is
still a very handy fs and it should not be judged relative to these
statements.

> once you seperate the volume management piece out, the actual performance
> question is a lot harder to answer. there are a lot of people who say that
> it's far faster then the alternate filesystems on Solaris, but I haven't
> seen any good comparisons between it and Linux filesystems.

One could install pg on solaris 10 and format the data-area as ufs and
then as zfs and compare import- and query-times and other benchmarking
but comparing ufs/zfs to Linux-filesystems would also be a comparison
of those two os'es.

-- 
regards
Claus